A:I knew him when he was the circuit judge, so when I moved back to Barbour County after finishing law school, I had my law office in Barbour County. And so did he, though we had two courthouses in the county. He was in Clayton, the county seat, and I was over in Eufaula, over on the Chattahoochee River there. And I immediately ran for district attorney, which was called circuit solicitor back then. So he was the judge in the court, and I was the prosecutor, while he sat in judgment. We never got along because he was extremely liberal on the bench and he really didn’t want the people in prison. I was very conservative. I didn’t like that, so we were in constant clashes throughout that period of time. But in 1958, then we got to know one another rather well because that’s when he was in the governor’s race then. And it was a race essentially [between] he and Governor Patterson. And I supported Governor Patterson because George Wallace had ruled against me some years earlier in a case, where the federal government was attempting to register, illegally, black voters in mass. And that was brought to my attention as the DA, and I brought it to the judge’s attention. And he said, though, “What do you want to do, Seymore?” I said, “Well, we can call a grand jury and indict him.” He said, “Well, that’s what we should do with the son-of-a-bitches is doing that. But, instead, I tell you what you do, Seymore. You file a petition, and I’ll enjoin them from illegally registering those nigger voters, and I’ll rule with you.” So I filed my petition and we were in court. After I presented the case, the evidence I sat down, and the judge ruled against me. And that upset the white people very badly. They had crowded into the courthouse and all spilled out into the hallways, waiting for that ruling. And so they were very angry with George Wallace. So, when he ran for governor, I wondered why he had done that. But, of course, I knew then, as I know now, that that was for the purpose of being sure that he got the liberal vote — the Jim Folsom vote — because Jim Folsom couldn’t run to succeed himself at that time. So, Wallace wanted to be sure that he inherited that vote, which he did. But it was a much smaller black vote than he anticipated. And John Patterson won the race.

During the 1958 Alabama governor‘s race, Seymore Trammell, the state’s attorney in George Wallace’s judicial circuit, maintained a public face of neutrality. Behind the scenes, however, Trammell helped supporters of Attorney General John Patterson produce flyers accusing Wallace of being soft on race.

After Wallace lost the election in a landslide, he consulted with Trammell about running a race-based campaign in the 1962 gubernatorial election. For the next ten years, Trammell — himself a hard-line segregationist — would aid and abet Wallace’s racist political strategy. He was one of Wallace’s most trusted aides until ego and corruption drove them apart.

Like Wallace, Seymore Trammell grew up in Alabama’s Barbour County. The Trammells were the only white tenant farmers on a 5,000-acre plantation. The family was very poor; Seymore and his six brothers and sisters were needed to work in the fields and attended school sporadically.

At age 17, Trammell joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal program, in which he learned telegraphy. Later he joined the Army, serving for three years. On the basis of courses Trammell had taken in the military, he was admitted to the University of Alabama and finished the pre-law and law programs in three years.
Trammell’s trips into black communities in Tuscaloosa and Birmingham provoked comment among other students at the university, who thought he might be involved in something shady. In fact, he was helping to support himself by managing a popular gospel group, the Harmony Jubilee Quartet. Trammell had always been entrepreneurial, and by the time he became district attorney in 1952, he was financially well-off from real estate investments.

Financing Wallace’s many campaigns was an expensive proposition. However, once Wallace became governor, he had a steady source of “donations” — kickbacks from state contracts, collected by Trammell, who had become Finance Director. Trammell was also willing to use his own assets to help the Wallace “cause.” On one occasion during the 1964 Presidential primaries, Trammell loaned Wallace’s campaign $20,000 to buy television air time.

After the 1968 presidential campaign, Trammell and Wallace parted ways amicably, possibly because of opposing views on campaign tactics. (Trammell felt the campaign should have spent every available dollar on advertising in states where Wallace was running close to Nixon, but Wallace decided to save the money for a future campaign.) The former aide also hoped to have his own career in politics. When Trammell ran for state treasurer in 1970, Wallace announced that he would “not even vote for Trammell, much less lend him his support”; Trammell did not get into the general election.

At President Nixon’s urging, the Justice Department had begun investigating Wallace and his associates. Nixon did not want Wallace to make another third-party bid for the presidency in 1972, and evidence of corruption would give him leverage against Wallace. Trammell had allegedly passed information about corruption in the Wallace administration to a Montgomery newspaper editor. He agreed to meet with Justice Department officials in 1970, but in the end refused to implicate Wallace and other members of the administration. The depressed and alcohol-dependent Trammell implicated himself in his conversations with Justice Department officials, however, and was soon facing charges of tax evasion. The Justice Department never felt it had enough evidence to bring a case against Wallace or his brother, Gerald, another subject of the investigation. Other Wallace supporters were indicted, but only Trammell was convicted. He served four years in a federal prison.

“The individual is handicapped by coming face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst. It rejects even the assumption that human creatures could espouse a philosophy which must ultimately destroy all that is good and decent.”

–J. Edgar Hoover

I have some intriguing material that was written by a key player in Governor George Wallace’s 1972 campaign.

These historic documents were written by Seymore Trammell, Campaign Director and confidant to Governor George Wallace, including memos of then Attorney General John Mitchell and other primary sources. These references also include the notorious whereabouts of ‘‘W.’ Bush’s “nomadic years,” and how Herbert W. Bush dispatched his son as an undercover operative to spy on the Wallace campaign.

After his release from MaxwellFederal Prison, Seymore and his son Warren, pieced together the events that led up to the conspiracy and subsequent attempt to assassinate him Oct. 31st of 1971, in Montgomery, Alabama, and Governor George Wallace on May 15th, 1972 in Laurel, Maryland during his Presidential campaign speech.